Rising concern over test cheating

In October, Georgia revoked the teaching licenses of eight Atlanta teachers and three school administrators in the Atlanta Public Schools, the first sanctions in one of the nation’s largest school cheating scandals. A state investigators’ analysis of erasures showed 178 educators were involved, 38 of them principals. Superintendent Beverly Hall retired just days before the inquiry results were released. She denied any involvement.

Cheating investigations have also been undertaken recently in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

In New York, the state Regents exams have grown in number and importance in the last decade as requirements for graduation, tracking the performance of schools and in new teacher evaluations.

“When I first started, preparation for proctoring the Regents exams was done with care to preserve the integrity of the test as an accurate assessment,” said Brian Dorph, who taught 10 years in public schools. “Recently that procedure has been eroded by pressures from the administration to pass students, to increase graduation rates.”

Dorph, now a tutor, took a settlement after years of fighting a charge of incompetence in New York City schools. He said leaving the public school system gives him the freedom to be a whistleblower to defend the scruples he said he tried to instill in classrooms. State records include his 2009 e-mail detailing instances where he observed teachers change multiple-choice answers. He said a “1” could be easily altered by a teacher to a “4,” carrying a red marking pen for scoring in one hand, and black ink pen in the other to change some of the students’ answers before scoring.

Dorph said cheating by teachers was common if a student was within 5 points of the passing grade of 65 in Regents exams — sometimes to give a kid a break, sometimes to improve the teacher’s pass rate, sometimes simply to shuffle a problem student to another grade.

Those types of cheating are also identified in the New York reports on other schools. Records showed multiple-choice questions and math questions were often the subject of accusations and that inflated grades on essays were also investigated.

King is expected on Monday to order changes to protect the “integrity” of state tests.

“This is something we are very concerned about,” King said in an interview. “We know our current procedures are not sufficiently robust to identify all the testing integrity violations.”

On Monday, he will announce more Regents exams will be analyzed for erasures that can indicate cheating. Additional plans call for analysis of “error patterns” and answers to open-ended questions that might show a student received a correct answer for a concept he or she clearly didn’t know. Soon, won’t be allowed to grade their students’ tests.

Regents exams will ultimately be taken and scored on computers, possibly as early as 2014, he said.

The state’s largest teachers’ union also recognizes the concern.

“Teachers and their union have no tolerance for cheating,” said Carl Korn, spokesman for the New York State United Teachers Union. “However, it’s also fair to ask whether the increase in cheating is a byproduct of the high-stakes testing that we know live in.

“That pressure of high-stakes testing is only going to increase with new teacher and principal evaluations in which a person’s career and livelihood could hinge on the performance of 25 8-year-olds,” Korn said.

“While there is excuse for test tampering, it’s easy to see how it’s a natural byproduct of the high-stakes testing culture,” Korn said.

In New York’s high schools, the number of cases rose from 13 in 2002-03 to 60 in 2009-10 and to 40 in 2010-11, hitting 60 twice during the period. In elementary schools, the cases increased from 12 in 2002-03 to 51 in 2010-11, with a high of 53 in 2006-07 and a low of six in 2003-04.

The concern isn’t new.

In 2003, The Associated Press cited hundreds of New York state Education Department documents in stories that showed cheating by New York teachers and testimony by teachers that the issue was ignored or covered up by colleagues. As a result, the state Education Department started requiring principals to sign certificates stating that they found no evidence of cheating.